In the Beginning There was a Shop... A Key to Lalka (The Doll), or on the Lublin Realities of the Novel. Footnotes

Abstract

The article is devoted to the real and to the novel Mincl family – the Lublin merchants and community workers. The author tries to show changes in social-economical reality in the second half of the 19^th century, pointing to merchants as a characteristic example of these kinds of reality. The characters of Mincls also serve exemplification of the statement of the way the real “here” is changed into the novel “there”; how a real topographic point (Mincl's shop) becomes the mythical axis mundi. This also makes it possible to compare the realities of the 19^th century Lublin and Warsaw with the world of Lalka.